BOOORRRREEEEEDDDDD!

I am sorry to have to tell you this, dear readers. It will shock you to hear it. My wife is lazy. There, i have said it, its out in the open. She seems to be insisting on taking the *whole* gestation period of an average women before giving birth. I mean, seriously folks, do i look like someone with a long attention span?

Apparently it is not appropriate for me to attempt to "unwrap" my new baby early. I feel like my life is in a very strange kind of Christmas Eve twilight zone in which I get myself briefly over excited at the thought of presents and then feel worn out and drift off to sleep, waking to discover not that Christmas Day has arrived but that I have succeded in sleeping for a full two minutes.

In other baby news, we had a vistiation from the Head of Midwifery the other day to discuss our "particular issues". Despite fears that we were going to have to do battle with a dragon over a whole range of issues (e.g. in an emergency, if wife had to be sliced, i would not leave her alone in the hospital as she would then panic - hence if hospital insisted that i could not stay outside visiting hours we would discharge her) they were brillant! They accepted each and every one of our issues, and even gave us the top lady's mobile number in case we encountered any problems and needed her to tell people that she has agreed to meet our requirments. Hopefully of course it won't come to that. I am, at any rate, planning a pain free birth (for me, if not the long suffering wife) at home, where i can surf the net and read books in comfort whilst throwing in the odd soothing comment such as "there, there dear" and "ohhh that's got to smart".

In other news I did a web search today to see if I could find some more information on the problem of evil - the topic result for my search criteria was indeed an interesting starting point to any approach to the topic - unfortunatly however it didn't move my thinking on substantially as it was my own blog post!!

yours as ever,

Bored and Broke,

the Broken Man

I Don't Care

As a priest-to-be, it is generally accepted that I should care. It's not just the big things, but the little day-to-day things that as a priest (well, okay, as a person) I am meant to care about. Things like where someone went on holiday, and how impressed they were by a concert they went to. It's these little details that make up the tapestry of people's lives.

Of all the people that I should want these details from, I am sure that my wife should be top of the list. Yet, when she gets home from the supermarket and tells me that she had a bit of a funny incident with someone charging her the wrong amount and trying to explain to the person what the problem was, and the person not understanding, and being sent to customer service (come on, please; be honest, you don’t care either)...i just lose the will to live. Dear reader, believe me, I try to care. I ask what people did at the weekend...I make the small talk, but when it comes down to it...I am really not interested. I realise that this makes me a bad person; that the rest of the world is probably deeply concerned about these hundreds of details that make up our humanity, but, for me, its all acting.

I have learnt to pretend to care about these things; sometimes I manage it, sometimes I am convincing (Wow! A new puppy! That is exciting! Are you going to take it to obedience school? It really is cute isn’t it..) other times I can hardly muster up the will to smile.

Sometimes I wonder if everyone is pretending, playing along, following the rules and trying to show an interest, and as such, it makes me very uninclined to to tell people about my life. This seems to make blogging a bit ridiculious; if I don’t care about what anyone else has to say then why should they care about what I have to say? Even as I write that sentence I realise it's not that simple. You see, sometimes reading other people's blogs I laugh out loud, or I find something incredibly touching, or I learn something. All of these things interest me. What someone brought at the supermarket (unless its funny)…well…I don’t care…does anyone? Are you all acting and just doing it better than me, or have I got the bit of me that creates an ability for interest in such things missing?

Baby Scan

We have just had a baby scan. I know what I am meant to say here. I know the rules of this game, and I know there are some women reading this, and I don’t want to get in trouble so..

"WOW its just so incredible to see my baby! I can't begin to tell you how exciting it was to see my baby…" Okay, you can stop reading now. Leave it right there and everyone will be happy.

The first scan was incredibly exciting, and was really clear, and I did feel all those incredible emotions. The second one was a few weeks later, and wasn’t such a big deal as we had been for the emergency scan already, and in honesty the second scan wasn’t as clear as the first one.

This one – well to be honest there was lots of searching around and “we” had decided not to find out the baby's gender (I am sure I have talked about that so won't go on about it again). So for me, as that was something they could look for and were not, its like being told; "here is something really exciting (okay, okay, someone) but you don’t get to know the exciting bit yet – the surprise bit – and you don’t get to play with it yet." Please don’t hate me – I was bored.

It's not that I am not excited about having a baby, I really, really am. It's just that, well, an odd medical image which looks like an x-ray on a monitor just didn’t make my heart flutter. I know I should have been wiping a tear away from my eye, but in all honesty I was fighting the urge to pick up my book. Okay, this makes me a terrible person, I know that, I suspect particuarly mothers, expectant and those already with children will be thinking; “OH, he is one of those men”, but I thought it worth posting the unvarnished truth, as I have a suspicion (okay, a hope) that I am not alone in this...

Yours as ever,

The Broken Man